Nany Evans oral history.indd - Washington Secretary of State

chickens. We don’t like whole chickens.” Now they like pieces of chicken, not the whole
carcass. Just eating a whole roast chicken is very bad to them. In China there were a lot of
(unappetizing) things we encountered. I loved a lot of the food, but a lot of it was parts of
the rooster that you don’t want to know about. One time when we were in Pakistan there
had been an avalanche so we couldn’t go back to our village on the road. That’s a whole
other story. But I’m sitting, on my own, in this little village way up high in the mountains
because Dan had gone up to the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Hughes: What year was this?
Evans: This was in the 1980s. And man walked by carrying a whole cow’s head. He had
been to the market and he was carrying this home for dinner.
Hughes: Yummy. … Well, let’s talk about domestic relations. Dan was the keynote speaker
for the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. That must have been
incredibly exciting. Before that, had you met the Rockefellers and Reagans or the Nixons?
Evans: Oh yes, we had. Each year the governors had a governors’ conference in D.C., in
January or February. Then the president had a dinner for the governors and their spouses.
So we had been there and had met them. And on other occasions too, campaigns or
whatever. Dan would go back to meet with them on different things.
Hughes: So you met the Reagans and the Rockefellers?
Evans: They had been governors together, so we met them a lot.
Hughes: Anybody who really impressed you? – where you thought, “Here I am. Nancy
from Spokane, and we’re traveling in some different circles now”?
Evans: Sure. We met people with capabilities and intelligence – the ability to do things
and enact things. They got to where they were for that reason. Each year there would be
a (national) governors’ conference; then there was a Western Governors’ Conference. The
Western governors tended to be closer because they had similar issues, water and land,
that sort of thing. We became really very good friends with about four or five governors. In
fact we would all get together on different occasions.
Hughes: Who were some of those?
Evans: It was the governors of Wyoming, Utah — Republicans and Democrats by the way.
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